Another animal on the farm was Billy, the pig, though I am sorry to say his place was so uninviting I did not care to visit him very often. But really, poor Billy was not to blame; his “pen” was so small, and there was no way for him to get out when he wanted to; how could he keep it clean and tidy?
Why he was singled out to be treated as a prisoner, when all the other animals on the farm were free to roam at will, was more than I could understand, unless it was because grandpa was too ill to attend to him. As I used to see Billy stare through the cracks in the walls of the narrow gloomy prison that shut him away from the great, beautiful world, and as I listened to his ceaseless grunting, I could not help but pity him. Although I did not understand his language, I felt sure that he must be complaining of his unhappy lot.
“How I wish that somebody would write a book for Billy,” said mistress to Guy one day, as they were passing his place, “so that people would be made to think how unjustly he is being treated.”
“Yes,” said Guy, “it’s just as easy to have pigs in clover as in a pen. Have I never told you about the excellent arrangement Uncle Ellison has on his farm?”
“No, you did not; what is it?” said mistress, eagerly.
“Well,” said Guy, “his pig yard is quite a good sized enclosure, extending at the rear into a little grove where the pigs can lie in the cool shade when it is hot. Adjoining this is a similar enclosure, and every year the pigs are changed from one field to the other, and the one last used by the pigs is plowed up and sown to clover. In this way they have a clean, wholesome and comfortable place all the time.”
“This explains why Uncle Ellison gets a higher price for his hogs than any farmer around there,” said mistress. “If grandpa were well, I would tell him about it; but perhaps you could make Billy just a little happier by spading up the ground inside of his pen.”
“Yes,” said Guy; “and perhaps the neighbor’s boys will help me.”
So the next day the boys locked Billy into the corn-crib while they turned the ground in his pen with spades and freshened it; the trough was scalded and scrubbed, and left in the sun to dry. When Billy was led back to his pen, he grunted his thankfulness to his friends the best he knew how. As for me, I concluded to put Uncle Ellison’s plan into my story; for who knows but some of the boys who read it may be farmers some day, and will want to try it?
While we were at grandpa’s one of his neighbors’ hogs was taken sick, and the man brought six little white pigs up to grandpa’s because he wished to separate them from their mother, for fear they too might catch the disease. I never saw anything prettier than those little pigs, and they were just as clean as so many kittens. The man put them into an old pen not far from Billy’s, and there they squealed and grunted to their hearts’ content, and stuck their noses through every little crack in the pen. I noticed that some of the boards were loose so that they could wiggle them up and down, and each one tried to make them wiggle a little more than the others had done before him. One day at dinner-time, when I was in my usual place on the window-sill, suddenly I saw a white streak shooting through the orchard and out into the road, and just then Guy jumped up and said: “There go the pigs.”